Paul Cézanne's Astronomy Observing Reports

I was honored to work with write and poet Jeannette Angell and poet Maria Nazos at a free presentation at the Cape Cod National Seashore tonight. They started off with original poetry and prose along with some multi-cultural history of the stories of the night sky.
The sky was hazy, not cooperative at all for my [...]

Yes, I set the alarm for 3AM trying to complete all but one of my Messiers with the binoculars. It was nice stepping outside already completely dark adapted. Here are my notes from my brief session.

I’ve processed the 14 I took of the ISS passing near Orion on March 15, 2009 as covered in this blog entry. The result is visually more interesting since you both see more stars and you see all of the tracks superimposed.

But there is more than just pretty pixels!

Jeannette and I drove to Marconi Beach this evening to try and watch the space shuttle launch. It is amazing that it goes from Florida to off the Massachusetts coast in about 8 or 9 minutes. Intellectually I know it goes that fast but having just driven that distance spread out over three days, I’m [...]

There are many amazing things in the sky, some are wonderful challenges, some are just beautiful, and some just take your breath away and make you say, “Oh!”
There is a small list of usual suspects that make you say “Oh” when you first see them. You never forget your first rings of Saturn or the [...]

If you are a reader of my blog, you surely already know about the beautiful conjunction that happened today. The crescent moon, Venus and Jupiter were within 2 degrees of each other. On the east coast of the USA, the Moon appeared to the left of Venus. In Asia Pacific, however, they made a smiley face! Here’s [...]

So I had read about the Zodiacal Light in one of the astronomy magazines and now that I live in a good dark place I was wondering if I could see it. What is the Zodiacal Light? From the wikipedia page:
The zodiacal light is a faint, roughly triangular, whitish glow seen in the night sky [...]

Three times this evening I went outside very briefly, and all three time I saw a meteor shoot across the sky. How pretty and what a nice coincidence. I know there are lots of not very famous meteor showers but I really couldn’t say that there was a radiant to these three.
Anyhow, after the Red [...]

So we’re driving back from the Cape and the skies are pretty nasty, snowing actually. But for some reason I check the Clear Sky Clock and it shows nice skies that night at YFOS. I’m pretty happy, it as been a dreadful winter. I check online to see who else might be going and frankly [...]

Here’s a shot of the crescent moon and Venus over Manchester NH.
The moon is way over exposed but I needed to do that to get the sunset just right. You can also see star tracks on both the moon and venus but that is expected. I think the exposure was 15 seconds.